


Fates We (Didn't) Make

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Genisys (2015), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Minor Canonical Character(s), Minor Character(s), POV Minor Character, Technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6028348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, the most life-changing events are the ones that never happened. </p><p>Or: Twelve people who watched Genisys explode, and then went on with their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fates We (Didn't) Make

Derek Reese gets into UCSB with a wrestling scholarship and spends several semesters dicking around in everything from geology to history without a clue of what he’s supposed to major in. He gives Computer Science a wide berth—tinkering with machines is his little brother’s thing. Eventually, he enlists in ROTC and lets the Army decide what he should do with the rest of his life. He’s good at the physical side of things, likes the discipline, and will graduate with a guaranteed career, which doesn’t hurt.

When the news about the terrorist attack at Cyberdyne breaks, Derek is mostly just relieved to know his family is okay. His parents are still upset by the discovery that some criminal is running around with fingerprints near-identical to their younger son’s, but Kyle himself just goes back to taking apart Derek’s old XBox and figuring out what makes it tick. He’s disappointed that the new OS is a bust, but Cyberdyne refunds their parents’ deposit, and Kyle takes a new coding class at the community college instead.

Derek, for his part, doesn’t really care about how awesome Genisys was supposed to be. The Department of Defense hadn’t cleared it for secure, official use, so if that was supposed to be the future, Derek wasn’t going to get to enjoy—or even use—it anyway.

* * *

Allison Young is almost nine and a half years old. It’s sad, she thinks, that that building got bombed by the terrorists, but…if she’s being honest, she’s much more worried about whether Santa will bring her that silver bracelet she’s been eying at the mall for ages. It’s pretty and delicate and braided like how she wears her hair, but Mom had said they couldn’t afford it for her birthday back in July.

* * *

James Ellison sticks with the FBI through his divorce, through his brother’s cancer scare, through Lila’s remarriage, and through the dissolution of his parish after an older priest bankrupts it. It’s strange that the law of man ends up being more abiding than the power of God—at least as both play out in his day-to-day life. But the Bureau means good, honest work, and James likes the moral clarity of it. Most of the time, that goes unchallenged, and the consistency is a comfort in an inconsistent world.

He’d considered preordering the Genisys system like everyone else, but James can barely use the features on his Bureau-issued smartphone beyond calling and texting. He doesn’t have enough of a personal life to need any fancy devices like that anyway.

Still, searching through the wreckage of Cyberdyne for any clues about who had leveled the building, James can’t help wondering what was so special about this particular technology that someone had felt the need to destroy it so thoroughly.

* * *

Riley Dawson is four years old, and all she remembers later is how her mother trembled so much watching the news that she cut herself on an apple peeler and needed stitches.

* * *

Marty Bedell drops out of Presidio Alto at sixteen. Much to the chagrin of his entire family, he earns his high school diploma at the public high school and marries Alyssa in a quickie City Hall ceremony as soon as they hit eighteen. Then, the two of them get the hell away from the rest of the Bedells. It’s not hard; they fall mostly off the grid and WWOOF for a while, help run a sketchy hostel in Belize for about six months, and then spend their early twenties crisscrossing first Europe and then East Asia, stopping to teach English or do odd jobs whenever their money runs out.

Alyssa’s dad breaks his leg while in the throes of a heart attack just after she turns 24, so they trade their yen for U.S. dollars and head back to California to take care of him and start the rest of their lives.

Marty’s just begun taking classes to get certified to teach middle school social studies someday when, in quick succession, two of his cousins die in separate IED incidents in Kandahar.

It’s the first time he’s felt any need to reach out to his family in nearly a decade, so it’s easy to ignore the hubbub over a bunch of early-adopter tech heads not getting their precious tablets.

* * *

Kacy Corbin finally rents the spare house to a nice young couple from one of the Dakotas; they have two little boys with a third on the way. She and Trevor Jr. become fast friends with the lot of them, and most of the time Trevor Sr. doesn’t seem to mind the company or the income.

Several years into the lease, the renters ask for permission to redo the basement. It’s never quite been finished, and they want to teach their kids some home-repair basics.

Kacy shrugs, only half paying attention because her phone has suddenly stopped working and she can hear sirens in the distance. “Go for it. It’s not like there’s anything important down there.”

* * *

George Lazlo samples the best shrimp cocktail he’s ever had in his life at the release party for _Beast Wizard XIX: Rumble in the Jungle_. An hour later, he goes into anaphylactic shock thanks to a previously undiagnosed shellfish allergy.

He may have passed a middle-aged suit with facial scars on his way to the recovery wing, once the ER team stabilizes him, but neither of them takes any notice of the other.

* * *

Jesse Flores is halfway through uni and, more importantly, halfway through the men’s rugby team, when suddenly all anyone can talk about is some weird bombing in the States.

At the campus bookstore, she rolls her eyes at the magazine rack—these things never have consequences that reach as far as Perth, no matter what the PM says, but every cover is about the attack and the company it had leveled. She buys _Us_ and _People_ with her coffee and pauses right before sitting down with her friend, as a realization hits her.

“Eh, nothing,” Jesse says in response to the other girl’s questioning look. “Just realized that with all the Genisys crap, I’ll have to go back to manually syncing all my stuff again like a peasant.”

* * *

Charley Dixon has never been out of the Mountain Time Zone before, but, then again, he’s never really tried to leave. He and Monica have a nice house, twin teenagers who are far less obnoxious than they could be, and a job he’s always loved. It’s not a bad life, even if it’s a small one.

Jane and David have just started their senior year, so the Dixon house is a storm of college applications in the fall of 2017. One otherwise unremarkable night in the midst of that, Charley finds his son taking a break from homework and snickering at some viral video he’s watching on his phone.

David shows him the screen; it’s a clip from a news station in California, where apparently two college students had been running naked through highway traffic. The newscaster speculates that it’s some kind of prank or hazing ritual gone wrong and says he’s just grateful no one was injured.

“Don’t worry, Dad, Janey and I know better,” David assures him without having to be asked. “But she’s way hot, right?” He points at the nude woman on the screen, though the footage is angled and blurred just enough to keep it from being R-rated.

Charley rolls his eyes and grabs his son’s phone, closing the app. “I hadn’t noticed. Go finish your problem set.”

In the wake of the Cyberdyne bombing, Charley joins the wave of first responders needed to search through the wreckage and finally gets to see the California coast. They don’t find much in the way of human remains—investigators are starting to think that the bombers were after the Genisys technology, not a body count—but Charley keeps finding handfuls of weird magnetized dust that clings to everything. The lab guys assure him repeatedly that it’s all just debris from the explosion, and definitely nontoxic.

* * *

Lauren Fields had kind of suspected something was up, but it’s not until after Sydney’s born, when they get her post-natal blood work back, that Dad figures out he’s been cuckolded and Mom realizes that, with Roger dead in a car accident four months earlier, she’s effectively on her own with a newborn.

Lauren’s epiphany, after they all but make her pick a side, is that both of her parents are very, very human. She chooses her sister.

It’s a hard few years after that. Lauren misses her dad; even if he’s turned out to be an unforgiving asshat. At least he finishes paying for her college tuition. She scrapes by on waitressing and daycare jobs to finish nursing school in two years—there’s no way Mom and Syd can afford to have her in medical school for twice that time—and graduates on a sunny spring morning in 2011.

Mom still hasn’t really figured out how to parent by herself, though, and she starts treating the hard parts with booze. Eventually, Lauren finds herself moving her toddler half-sister to a new studio apartment where it’s just the two of them, the court-ordered custody papers, and very little idea of what comes next.

No matter how well behaved she is, Sydney’s still just a kid, effectively orphaned by a dead dad and an alcoholic mother. And no matter how keenly Lauren still feels her own losses on that front, she won’t let her sister suffer more than she has to just for the sin of existing. So they manage.

It helps that Sydney never gets sick. When she finally hits five, there’s kindergarten and Head Start and afterschool. Lauren earns enough seniority at the hospital to claim more of the shifts that let her minimize babysitting costs. Eventually, things level out.

The hospital had promised that every staff member would receive a Genisys-equipped smartphone, which most of the other nurses were excited about. Lauren figures it’s just a more efficient way to be summoned into work when she’s off-duty, so she’s not especially disappointed when the whole thing goes up in literal flames. When the administration ends up putting the funding toward raises for most of the non-doctor staff, she figures it’s a win all around.

* * *

Andy Goode lucks into a major scholarship from Cyberdyne Systems after his internship; he graduates from Caltech a semester early and heads straight into the company’s R&D department. He’s a manager a couple of years later, and Cyberdyne pays for him to earn a master’s degree, and then a doctorate. By age 35, he’s running the whole department—for about two months, before an enigmatic outsider with a near-inhuman gift for machine learning shows up.

Luckily, the charismatic, workaholic, impossibly magnetic John Connor has no interest in Andy’s job, just in leveraging what the Turk and its siblings have become into something game-changing. His insights into artificial intelligence make Andy feel like he’s witnessing an act of divine creation.

Within months, Cyberdyne outpaces Microsoft’s software, Apple’s interfaces, and Google’s cloud. A few years later, they’re poised to change the world. Andy never did find the time to get married or have kids, but he never questions whether the sleepless nights were worth it, and there’s no one more eager to collaborate with Cyberdyne’s visionary CTO.

There’s also no one more devastated when it emerges that he had been at work when the bombs went off. Andy vows to rebuild the whole system in memory of the man he remembers like a brother.

* * *

Savannah Weaver is nearly seventeen the first time she ever brings a boy home, and Kyle isn’t even a boyfriend or anything, just some guy in her advanced math class who seems nice enough when they’re paired up for a project. Mom is of course at the office; something about the Cyberdyne bombing had kept her actually living at Zeira Corp lately, instead of just appearing to do so.

Juanita is cleaning downstairs, so Kyle follows Savannah upstairs to her room, where there’s enough space for both of them to work at her desk.

“Nice picture,” Kyle says mildly, gesturing at a family portrait taken when Savannah was four years old, before the helicopter accident had changed her mother from the lighthearted, grinning woman in the picture to…whoever she’s been since. “Are your parents cool? They look nice.”

Savannah shrugs. “My dad’s dead. Mom is…whatever. She’s at work all the time, mostly, but she lets me do what I want as long as my grades are good.”

“Cool. And, um, sorry. So…randomization theory?”

They’re interrupted several hours later, when Catherine Weaver walks in through the open door and silently observes them for several minutes. Kyle doesn’t even realize she’s there, but Savannah is used to her mother’s odd behaviors and simply ignores her. When it becomes clear she isn’t going away, though, Savannah sighs and performs introductions.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kyle Reese,” Catherine says, with her usual stiff smile. “Will you be staying long?”

**Author's Note:**

> Because no Terminator canon is complete without these people.
> 
> Thanks to my forever betas [Red](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham) (who also assured me this was actually an interesting pursuit) and [Lex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) (who came up with the summary).


End file.
